Sequential manipulation tasks require a robot to perceive the state of an environment and plan a sequence of actions leading to a desired goal state, where the ability to reason about spatial relationships among object entities from raw sensor inputs is crucial. Prior works relying on explicit state estimation or end-to-end learning struggle with novel objects or new tasks. In this work, we propose SORNet (Spatial Object-Centric Representation Network), which extracts object-centric representations from RGB images conditioned on canonical views of the objects of interest. We show that the object embeddings learned by SORNet generalize zero-shot to unseen object entities on three spatial reasoning tasks: spatial relationship classification, skill precondition classification and relative direction regression, significantly outperforming baselines. Further, we present real-world robotic experiments demonstrating the usage of the learned object embeddings in task planning for sequential manipulation.
Understanding the operation of biological and artificial networks remains a difficult and important challenge. To identify general principles, researchers are increasingly interested in surveying large collections of networks that are trained on, or biologically adapted to, similar tasks. A standardized set of analysis tools is now needed to identify how network-level covariates -- such as architecture, anatomical brain region, and model organism -- impact neural representations (hidden layer activations). Here, we provide a rigorous foundation for these analyses by defining a broad family of metric spaces that quantify representational dissimilarity. Using this framework we modify existing representational similarity measures based on canonical correlation analysis to satisfy the triangle inequality, formulate a novel metric that respects the inductive biases in convolutional layers, and identify approximate Euclidean embeddings that enable network representations to be incorporated into essentially any off-the-shelf machine learning method. We demonstrate these methods on large-scale datasets from biology (Allen Institute Brain Observatory) and deep learning (NAS-Bench-101). In doing so, we identify relationships between neural representations that are interpretable in terms of anatomical features and model performance.
Unsupervised multi-object representation learning depends on inductive biases to guide the discovery of object-centric representations that generalize. However, we observe that methods for learning these representations are either impractical due to long training times and large memory consumption or forego key inductive biases. In this work, we introduce EfficientMORL, an efficient framework for the unsupervised learning of object-centric representations. We show that optimization challenges caused by requiring both symmetry and disentanglement can in fact be addressed by high-cost iterative amortized inference by designing the framework to minimize its dependence on it. We take a two-stage approach to inference: first, a hierarchical variational autoencoder extracts symmetric and disentangled representations through bottom-up inference, and second, a lightweight network refines the representations with top-down feedback. The number of refinement steps taken during training is reduced following a curriculum, so that at test time with zero steps the model achieves 99.1% of the refined decomposition performance. We demonstrate strong object decomposition and disentanglement on the standard multi-object benchmark while achieving nearly an order of magnitude faster training and test time inference over the previous state-of-the-art model.
Self-supervised learning has been widely used to obtain transferrable representations from unlabeled images. Especially, recent contrastive learning methods have shown impressive performances on downstream image classification tasks. While these contrastive methods mainly focus on generating invariant global representations at the image-level under semantic-preserving transformations, they are prone to overlook spatial consistency of local representations and therefore have a limitation in pretraining for localization tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. Moreover, aggressively cropped views used in existing contrastive methods can minimize representation distances between the semantically different regions of a single image. In this paper, we propose a spatially consistent representation learning algorithm (SCRL) for multi-object and location-specific tasks. In particular, we devise a novel self-supervised objective that tries to produce coherent spatial representations of a randomly cropped local region according to geometric translations and zooming operations. On various downstream localization tasks with benchmark datasets, the proposed SCRL shows significant performance improvements over the image-level supervised pretraining as well as the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods.
Real-world videos contain many complex actions with inherent relationships between action classes. In this work, we propose an attention-based architecture that models these action relationships for the task of temporal action localization in untrimmed videos. As opposed to previous works that leverage video-level co-occurrence of actions, we distinguish the relationships between actions that occur at the same time-step and actions that occur at different time-steps (i.e. those which precede or follow each other). We define these distinct relationships as action dependencies. We propose to improve action localization performance by modeling these action dependencies in a novel attention-based Multi-Label Action Dependency (MLAD)layer. The MLAD layer consists of two branches: a Co-occurrence Dependency Branch and a Temporal Dependency Branch to model co-occurrence action dependencies and temporal action dependencies, respectively. We observe that existing metrics used for multi-label classification do not explicitly measure how well action dependencies are modeled, therefore, we propose novel metrics that consider both co-occurrence and temporal dependencies between action classes. Through empirical evaluation and extensive analysis, we show improved performance over state-of-the-art methods on multi-label action localization benchmarks(MultiTHUMOS and Charades) in terms of f-mAP and our proposed metric.
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to discriminate images from unseen classes by exploiting relations to seen classes via their semantic descriptions. Some recent papers have shown the importance of localized features together with fine-tuning the feature extractor to obtain discriminative and transferable features. However, these methods require complex attention or part detection modules to perform explicit localization in the visual space. In contrast, in this paper we propose localizing representations in the semantic/attribute space, with a simple but effective pipeline where localization is implicit. Focusing on attribute representations, we show that our method obtains state-of-the-art performance on CUB and SUN datasets, and also achieves competitive results on AWA2 dataset, outperforming generally more complex methods with explicit localization in the visual space. Our method can be implemented easily, which can be used as a new baseline for zero shot learning.
Entity alignment is a viable means for integrating heterogeneous knowledge among different knowledge graphs (KGs). Recent developments in the field often take an embedding-based approach to model the structural information of KGs so that entity alignment can be easily performed in the embedding space. However, most existing works do not explicitly utilize useful relation representations to assist in entity alignment, which, as we will show in the paper, is a simple yet effective way for improving entity alignment. This paper presents a novel joint learning framework for entity alignment. At the core of our approach is a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based framework for learning both entity and relation representations. Rather than relying on pre-aligned relation seeds to learn relation representations, we first approximate them using entity embeddings learned by the GCN. We then incorporate the relation approximation into entities to iteratively learn better representations for both. Experiments performed on three real-world cross-lingual datasets show that our approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art entity alignment methods.
This paper aims at learning representations for long sequences of continuous signals. Recently, the BERT model has demonstrated the effectiveness of stacked transformers for representing sequences of discrete signals (i.e. word tokens). Inspired by its success, we adopt the stacked transformer architecture, but generalize its training objective to maximize the mutual information between the masked signals, and the bidirectional context, via contrastive loss. This enables the model to handle continuous signals, such as visual features. We further consider the case when there are multiple sequences that are semantically aligned at the sequence-level but not at the element-level (e.g. video and ASR), where we propose to use a Transformer to estimate the mutual information between the two sequences, which is again maximized via contrastive loss. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the learned representations on modeling long video sequences for action anticipation and video captioning. The results show that our method, referred to by Contrastive Bidirectional Transformer ({\bf CBT}), outperforms various baselines significantly. Furthermore, we improve over the state of the art.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.
A key solution to visual question answering (VQA) exists in how to fuse visual and language features extracted from an input image and question. We show that an attention mechanism that enables dense, bi-directional interactions between the two modalities contributes to boost accuracy of prediction of answers. Specifically, we present a simple architecture that is fully symmetric between visual and language representations, in which each question word attends on image regions and each image region attends on question words. It can be stacked to form a hierarchy for multi-step interactions between an image-question pair. We show through experiments that the proposed architecture achieves a new state-of-the-art on VQA and VQA 2.0 despite its small size. We also present qualitative evaluation, demonstrating how the proposed attention mechanism can generate reasonable attention maps on images and questions, which leads to the correct answer prediction.
Recently, ensemble has been applied to deep metric learning to yield state-of-the-art results. Deep metric learning aims to learn deep neural networks for feature embeddings, distances of which satisfy given constraint. In deep metric learning, ensemble takes average of distances learned by multiple learners. As one important aspect of ensemble, the learners should be diverse in their feature embeddings. To this end, we propose an attention-based ensemble, which uses multiple attention masks, so that each learner can attend to different parts of the object. We also propose a divergence loss, which encourages diversity among the learners. The proposed method is applied to the standard benchmarks of deep metric learning and experimental results show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on image retrieval tasks.